According to the Power over Ethernet (PoE) IEEE Standard 802.3at a powered device (PD) is powered by power sourcing equipment (PSE) via an Ethernet cable. The PD is assigned to a power class and is adapted to indicate its power class to the PSE, wherein the PSE uses a lookup table for providing a predefined amount of power depending on the indicated power class of the PD. The predetermined amount of power provided by the PSE has to be relatively large, in order to ensure that the PD receives the amount of power, which is needed by the PD, even if the Ethernet cable has a maximally assumed cable length and thus maximally assumed cable losses are present. Since the length of the Ethernet cable between the PSE and the PD will generally be smaller than the maximally assumed cable length, the PSE generally provides unnecessarily an amount of power being larger than the amount of power required by the PD. Thus, the power budget allocation is not very good.